Sound by Tom Simmons
With thanks to Joe King and Elizabeth Hobbs
Funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Film and Video Workshop
Screening formats: Digibeta PAL, miniDV, DVD
Ratio 4:3
Running time 00:03:30
**SCREENINGS 2009-10
InCounter + Artkillart, .HBC, Berlin, Germany
Artinavan// Brixton's Smallest Cinema, London, UK
VIDEOMEDEJA: International Video Festival, Novi Sad, Serbia
Verge Art Fair, Miami Beach, USA
Syntagma Metro Station [World AIDS Day events], Athens, Greece
Visions in New York City, Macy Gallery, TC Columbia University, NY, USA
Optica: Festival Internacional de Videoarte, Huarte, Spain
namaTRE.ba Video Project III, Academy of Fine Arts, Trebinje, Bosnia & Herzegovina
Optica: Festival Internacional de Videoarte, Paris, France
Optica: Festival Internacional de Videoarte, Córdoba, Spain
London International Animation Festival, London, UK
Optica: Festival Internacional de Videoarte, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Videokills: International Video Art Festival, Berlin, Germany
ArcheTime: Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Time, New York, USA
Visions in the Nunnery, Bow Arts Trust, London, UK
Athens Video Art Festival, Gazi Technopolis, Greece
Under Skies, Stone Squid Experimental Art Space, Hastings, UK
East End Film Festival, London, UK
Transfixed Motion | Transitory Still, Sheffield Institute of Art & Design Gallery, UK
Rotoreliefs, Vibe Bar, London, UK
PLAY EXCERPT (00:01:15)
Sequential photographs of a London city park are projected onto sets, re-photographed and animated into new scenes. The projected stills are manipulated through mirrors and curved glass to create kaleidoscopic patterns of light and colour, transforming the environment into something otherworldly. Location recordings are diffused through sheets of glass and jam jars, and granulated into minute parts: time-slices of sounds.
Colours in the sky, shadows in the trees and on the surface of a model boat lake are reflected and warped into shimmering compositions. They fade, stutter and merge, accelerating and decelerating in rhythmic flux. City sounds, fluttering leaves and underwater echoes resonate through the glass in layers that pulse and swell.
The work attempts to pause and look more closely on an everyday, urban backdrop; to capture and expand hundreds of tiny, frozen moments that might otherwise escape us or pass by unseen.
Michaela Nettell and Tom Simmons, 2008